Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Lunch with Trish

I had lunch with Trish for the second time this week - we need some catch up time because we've missed some weeks. It was a really wonderful conversation today.

A couple of months ago, Teresa posed a question to Trish and me when we were talking about how much we like new and different. Teresa's question was WHY was that important. This launched into a tangent conversation about memorable moments in our lives - times that we felt very in tune with the world, very happy, etc.

Trish and I both related events about specific places/times, but the people we were with - if anyone - were not the major attraction. For example, I mentioned being underground in the tomb of Unas at Sakkara, Egypt, alone, for quite some time. I will never forget those moments - they were incredible. For Teresa, the things she recalled were about the people she was with - not the place or the activity.

I have devoted considerable thought to this since that conversation. It has been one of the trains of thought going in my brain since then. Today I shared my theory with Trish. I have "a Patsy Theory" about a zillion different things, and this is the latest one.

It boils down to where one's focus is. My focus is largely internal. That's not to say I'm an introvert - I'm not. But where my energy is devoted is largely internal. The amount of time I spend thinking versus sharing my thinking with others is very lopsided. I spend far more time engaged in the internal. I like people, and enjoy conversation immensely, but the I don't want to do that to the exclusion of alone time.

When your focus is internal, you're more moved by your internal reaction to things, places, events. Because you're processing it, you're not likely to want to be engaged with other people at the time. I would have considered it a real incovenience to have to talk with someone when I was in the tomb. I wanted to experience it - ie have an internal experience. If you're externally oriented, you want to share it with someone - the experience is in the sharing of it.

I am still working on the details of my theory, but that is the basic concept. That those of us who are internally focused are more about the experience (and therefore the places/events) than we are about the people we're sharing the experience with. Neither is better than the other - just a different way of looking at the world.

Obviously, I am not done working on this theory yet...


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